Jitterbit, the leading provider of fast, agile integration solutions for the modern enterprise, today announced the release of the Harmony Winter ’17 Citizen Integrator, the first integration solution that combines consumer-level ease-of-use for rapid scale-out with enterprise sophistication for complex integrations for thousands of cloud and on-premise applications. Jitterbit’s integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) combines a do-it-yourself integration experience for everyday business users with a powerful design experience for developers, all running together on a single cloud platform with centralized management and monitoring for necessary IT governance.

Traditional integration approaches do not to meet modern businesses’ need to scale out integration capacity to handle the thousands of connections required to support digital business. The answer is to scale out integration capabilities to all employees, expanding access beyond the domain of a limited group of integrators that’s common today. However, IT departments have struggled to provide solutions that can be used by thousands of non-technical employees while maintaining centralized governance and control over the integrations. In its recent “Market Guide for Integration Software as a Service” report, Gartner highlighted the exponential growth and challenges posed by the growing class of “citizen integrators.”[1]

“This ‘citizen integrator’ phenomenon will have a dramatic effect on business users’ expectations for handling simple integration tasks themselves at work, as they do at home,” the report stated. “It may also create compliance risks and/or technical debt if employees acquire and use these tools directly, without the knowledge or support of application integration leaders.”

Another article from Gartner described the massive shift towards this phenomenon in the next few years, stating that, “by 2018, in most organizations at least 50 percent of new integration flows will be implemented by citizen integrators.”[2]

Citizen Integrator Scales Out to Meet New Digital Demands

Jitterbit Harmony Winter ’17 was designed to meet the new demand for a collaborative approach to integration that enables business users and traditional IT personnel to work more closely to connect the thousands of applications that power digital business. It takes a modern approach that provides intuitive, self-service integration for all employees, a powerful technical design studio for developers and the centralized control and management of an enterprise-class cloud integration platform.

Jitterbit’s new Citizen Integrator delivers a simple integration interface that empowers everyday users to accomplish basic integration functions in seconds across a variety of cloud and on-premise endpoints, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Box, Slack, etc., without special training or IT assistance. Based on the industry-leading Jitterpak technology, Citizen Integrator provides prepackaged “recipes” for popular integration workflows, which can be sealed and made broadly available to a large base of employees, partners and customers as part of a managed collaboration between integration experts and non-technical users.

Citizen Integrator, combined with Jitterbit’s enhanced design studio for integration developers and power users, paves the way for a bimodal integration strategy that is already being adopted by large enterprises’ CIOs. For Jitterbit’s large enterprise customers, the bimodal integration strategy scales out connectivity to citizen integrators for lighter integration tasks, while continuing to provide developers with a sophisticated design studio necessary to support enterprise-class integration needs. All integrations are unified on a single platform with full governance and control from the Web Management Console for maximum security and reliability. Jitterbit’s larger customers, including Odyssey Logistics and Greenpoint, have already moved to adopt the new model.

The Citizen Integrator satisfies the acute need of independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide more than just APIs to enable the integration of their applications to external services and apps. The new partner strategy allows ISVs to embed Jitterbit’s Citizen Integrator integration capability directly into their customer-facing solution and make that available to every single user of their application through a secure and managed connectivity environment. Jitterbit has already partnered with several leading companies, including Autodesk and Endowance, to offer the embedded integration solution.

“Jitterbit allowed us to quickly deliver a managed service that provides prebuilt integration solutions to all INFOR customers,” said Endowance CEO Rob Hienekamp. “Citizen Integrator enables us to get INFOR customers up and running in less than three hours with prebuilt best practices for quote to cash and field service.”

Jitterbit Harmony Winter ’17 also includes significant upgrades for a range key functions and capabilities:

Operations Management: New enhancements throughout the platform for customized configuration of collection, presentation, and notification of activities, errors, and other logged information.

Project Management and Control: New tools and features to help customers deploy, manage, test and audit integration projects to avoid costly mistakes ahead of production.

Design: New features that extend and flex integration designs, including scripting functions, expanded global variable support, and more.

Scalability and Performance: Over 60 new performance enhancements to enable bigger loads and more integrations.

“The launch of Harmony Winter ‘17, and Citizen Integrator in particular, is democratizing integration to bring connectivity to all users and address a growing challenge for companies across a range of industries and sizes,” said Jitterbit CEO George Gallegos. “The ability to scale out technology quickly can be the difference between winning or losing with digital business, and Jitterbit’s new platform empowers companies to succeed with fast, flexible and secure integrations across the entire organization.”

Jitterbit Harmony Winter ’17 is immediately available to the public and all current customers have been automatically upgraded to the latest platform. New users can try Harmony free for 30 days at www.jitterbit.com/try.